How Extreme is God?

"In the second place, the Word of God is not rightly divided when the Law is not preached in its full sternness and the Gospel not in its full sweetness, when, on the contrary, Gospel elements are mingled with the Law and Law elements with the Gospel."  Thesis 6, C. F. W. Walter.

There are times, when we read God's Word, that we are sort of uncomfortable with just how stern God can be.  Whether it be a careless word spoken, a lustful thought, an intention to hurt or harm our neighbor, or even harboring anger against another, God says that the price to pay for each of them is condemnation.  That sternness is something that we have a tough time with.  After all, a little white lie calling for the same result as murder just doesn't seem right.  And yet, that is the price to pay when it comes to breaking God's Law.

By that same token, the word of forgiveness in the Gospel is also one that we sometimes have a tough time with.  God relentlessly pursues the worst of sinners and those whose lives aren't all that sinful.  God wants to pour out His grace on all, and so He says that even the most hardened murderer, the most perverse adulterer, and the biggest thief can all be redeemed simply be believing that Jesus died to restore them to God.  We want to add things to that, to require something of them to "prove" that they are sorry for what they have done.  But God's gracious attitude toward them is something that, at times, also makes us uncomfortable.

God is more extreme than we tend to think, I would say.  He is unbending in what His Law calls for.  Even a single thought contrary to what He desires and designs is worthy of condemnation.  Yet, God is also far more gracious than we could ever imagine.  Simply calling upon His name and asking for forgiveness is enough for God to open the doors to eternity and welcome them home.  God is stern in the extreme when it comes to keeping His Law, and He is inviting in the extreme when it comes to His eternal kingdom.

That's the point here in this thesis.  We can never be as strict as God in His Law, and we can never be as gracious as God in His Gospel.  So, as we seek to communicate both the Law and the Gospel in our proclamation of God and of Jesus, we want to strive to make sure that the Law is heard in its utter strictness, and that the Gospel is heard in its utter sweetness. 

How Do We Mess This Up, Part 1

The first manner of confounding Law and Gospel is one most easily recognized--and the grossest.  It is adopted, for instance, by the Papists, Socinians, and Rationalists and consists in this, that Christ is represented as a new Moses, or Lawgiver, and the Gospel turned into a doctrine of meritorious works, while at the same time those who teach that the Gospel is the message of the free grace of God in Christ are condemned and anathematized, as is done by the papists.  C. F. W. Walther, Thesis 5

At this point in our ongoing discussion of these theses, we get to the point where Walther begins to point out the many varied ways that we humans tend to misuse God's Law and Gospel in our application of it.  Now, in this first point of that here, you probably see some names in that thesis and may wonder, who are those people, and what did they do?

The essence of the thesis is this: If you turn what God has done in Jesus into anything other than a message of good news, you have distorted God's law and the gospel.  Jesus came into the world to rescue sinful human beings and to restore them to the Father.  His perfect life was lived so that His perfection could cover us.  He died with our sin to take away our sin.  He rose to new life so that we would have the assurance of new life.  In other words, all that Jesus did was to make us right with God.  To take what He did and to make it somehow into something that we still have to do is just plain turning the good news into another kind of work.

There are many different ways that we can confuse this teaching.  When we say that someone has to "get right with God" before they are part of God's people, we are confusing the law and the gospel.  The gospel message is that Jesus, and Jesus alone, makes them right with God.  A change in their actions or behavior does not get them right with God.  Yes, we hope and pray that, as a redeemed child of God, that repentance would take hold in their heart and bring about change, but that isn't a requirement.  All that is required is to believe that Jesus has redeemed you and made you God's own child.  So if we say that someone has to give up a sinful behavior before being one of God's children, no matter how small or large, we turn the good news into a law, and in doing so, take away from what Jesus has done for us.

The other thing that Walther points out here is that, when someone then says that the true proclamation of the good news isn't what makes us right with God, this is also messing up the teaching of the law and the gospel.  So, for example, if someone were to look at the previous paragraph and say that this is wrong, that the person has to change before they can be a Christian, and that I am wrong in what I wrote, they are also confusing the law and the gospel.  The gospel is simply good news.  The law points out where we fall short, and the gospel tells us what God has done for us.  It really is that simple.  But we humans have this unfortunate tendency to take simple things and make them complicated.  That's why we need to revisit things like this from time to time.

Making it Make Sense

"The true knowledge of the distinction between the Law and the Gospel is not only a glorious light, affording the correct understanding of the entire Holy Scriptures, but without this knowledge Scripture is and remains a sealed book."  C. F. W. Walther, Thesis 4 in "Law and Gospel"

I remember it very vividly.  The young man was leading the student Bible study, and he was looking at one of the stories where Jesus warns against money.  He started off talking about how money was a bad thing, and that God's people should be poor and not have money, as money would inevitably lead people away from God.  I remember the challenge of not embarrasing the young man for a wrongful understanding of what Jesus was really saying, while at the same time wanting to show that there were other things at work with what Jesus was getting at there.

On another occasion, I remember talking with another young man about what Jesus and His crucifixion meant.  This young man was driven by guilt to try to do right in everything that he did.  After all, he reasoned, Jesus paid such a high price for me, and that now meant, in his mind, that he had to do everything right, not so much to repay Jesus, but out of fear that his failure to live right would mean he would be cast away from God.  In other words, the sacrifice of Jesus actually inspired guilt in him, instead of the comfort of knowing that God had paid his price for him in Jesus.

It seems that our human nature, when we engage God's Word, so often is to misunderstand it.  We read something that is intended to be good news, and we take it as a club to bludgeon ourselves or others with it.  Or, we read something that is a strict reminder of just how righteous and holy God is, and when we look at ourselves, we think we aren't doing too badly, and so it really doesn't seem to apply to us.  (For example, how many of us really, really think that we are the chief of sinners, as Paul would write?  We see so many other examples that seem worse than us, and so a word of law actually comforts us, which is the very point of this thesis.)

This is why the previous thesis, the one about rightly applying the Law and the Gospel, is so vital, and why this thesis draws directly from it.  If you make the Law into a comfort, the intent behind it is sealed from you.  If you take the good news and make it something you or others have to do as a requirement, the intent of the good news is sealed from you.  Now, I will say, not a single one of us will nail this every time, which is again why we cling to firmly to God's forgiveness in Jesus.  Yet, as we grow in God's Word, hopefully we start to realize that correctly applying the Law and the Gospel is a much tougher task than what we may have thought, and we see how it is the key to understanding so much of what God has said.

As a final point on this, this is where the role of the Church overall comes in.  On our own, we will quite often misunderstand what God is saying.  But when God's people come together and talk through what God says, God's Spirit quite often guides us to a deeper, and perhaps even better, underestanding of what God is trying to communicate.  My misunderstanding may be corrected as I hear how someone else reads the same passsage, and my knowledge and understanding may help someone else who is misunderstanding.  This in particular is why gathering in study and in worship is so vital for God's people, for there, the iron sharpens iron, one of God's people sharpening another.

WARNING! DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

"Rightly distinguishing the Law and the Gospel is the most difficult and the highest art of Christians in general and of theologians in particular.  It is taught only by the Holy Spirit in the school of experience."  C. F. W. Walther's Thesis 3

In some respects, figuring out the difference between God's laws and God's good news would not seem to be all that difficult.  When it comes to simply reading what God says in His Word, and then figuring out if the statement is a statement of Law or Gospel, one may not find it too difficult to decide.  When one reads, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," very few of us would shout out, "That's Good News!"

The lecturer C. F. W. Walther would even go so far as to say, in his lectures on this thesis, that the doctrine of the Law and the Gospel is rather easy to learn, so easy that even children can learn it.  It is when it comes to the application and the use of these teachings that they become rather difficult to distinguish.  Perhaps an example best helps to illustrate this.

A young lady within the congregation becomes pregnant.  She, and her family, have been very faithful in learning God's Word and in attending worship and living out their faith.  But now, she and her boyfriend have tried out a few things, and she now discovers that she is pregnant.  What is the proper response of the pastor or the Christian to whom she makes this confession?

Hopefully, right now, you are saying that you don't have enough information to really know what would be proper to say.  That means that you can already see that, to properly know when to speak law or Gospel, one needs to know more about the situation than its simple presentation.  You have to know the person.  You have to know their background.  You have to know what led to the situation. 

Looking at our example, we could see the application of the law or the gospel in a few different ways.  If we knew this girl, and we knew she was starting to rebel against her upbringing and her faith, and we knew that she was intentionally doing things to irritate her parents, we might take one approach, likely that of the law.  However, let's say that she has been a very faithful girl to faith and family, who just happened to be out with her boyfriend one night, and hadn't thought through her "warning signs", who made a mistake, who feels very sorrowful about it, and knows that it is going to impact the rest of her life.  Wouldn't that call for a bit of a different approach?  Perhaps one that still reminds her of God's law, but one that shares good news and forgiveness with her, while at the same time offering support for the difficult journey ahead. 

That is why Walther can say that the application of Law and Gospel is one that is truly learned from the Holy Spirit in the realm of experience.  Rightly knowing if we need to apply law or gospel means we have to know the person.  It means we have to know the situation.  The trouble is, quite often, we humans seek to hide those things that paint us in a negative light, which often means that we are applying law or gospel to a situation without knowing the half of the situation. 

In the end, we realize that only God alone can truly rightly apply Law and Gospel to our lives.  We still are called to speak that word to each other, and to be wise in speaking it.  But we are also called to remember that we will fail in the proper application more often than we get it right, and because of that, we are to cling to the forgiveness of God in Jesus all the more.

Applying the Correct Medicine

"Only he is an orthodox teacher who not only presents all the articles of faith in accordance with Scripture, but also rightly distinguishes from each other the Law and the Gospel."  C. F. W. Walther's Thesis 2.

When you get sick, one of the more important things that a doctor can do is give you the proper medication for what ails you.  If he/she were to give you a treatment plan that didn't match what the problem was, the situation could actually be made worse.  Imagine being told that you were going to need surgery for a cold, or being told that your broken bone would be fine if you took cough syrup.  It would make no sense, and could actually end up doing far more damage.

As we look at this thesis, there are a couple of things at work here.  The first one corresponds with the first phrase, that an orthodox teacher presents all the articles of faith in accordance with the Scriptures.  This is an important point to make.  God speaks many things in His Word.  While different parts of what God says apply to our lives at different times, we still need to hear everything that God teaches us.  From how we have been made, to what God has done for us in redeeming us, to what our interactions are to look like with each other, and the importance of reaching out to those who don't know the good news, God teaches us a lot of different things.  A true teacher of God's Word will make sure to teach on all of these, not leaving any of them out.

However, as yesterday's blog discussed, the whole realm of Scripture finds two major teachings at work, that of God's Law and that of God's Gospel.  This same teacher of God's Word not only strives to teach everything that God teaches in His Word, but strives to do so by rightly figuring out if something is God's command to us, or if it is God's good news to be proclaimed to us.  If he were to speak, say, of what Jesus accomplished on the cross, and instead of making it good news, were to make it come across as though you now had to live up to that sacrifice in order to be pleasing to God, he would be failing to distinguish the good news from God's commands. 

We will touch on these things much more in this series.  These various theses will hone us in on how exactly we do this, why it is important, and what all is at stake as we apply the Law/Gospel dynamic to God's Word.  So keep reading and commenting as we think through these matters.

Your Bible is Full of This

"The doctrinal contents of the entire Holy Scriptures, both of the Old and the New Testament, are made up of two doctrines differing fundamentally from each other, viz., the Law and the Gospel."  Thesis 1 of C. F. W. Walther's, Law and Gospel.

Sometimes God seems mean, angry, and vindictive.  Yet, at other times, God seems deeply caring, compassionate, and merciful.  Why is this?  Well, to some degree, that is explained by the thesis I listed above.  God created the world and human beings to live and operate in specific ways.  That design was broken very early on, and that brokenness now fills everything in creation.  God's Law was broken, and that means that all people now live outside of God's will and design.  In other words, even at our best, we are still lawbreakers, and God takes His law so seriously that such a state puts us under His fury and wrath.

On the other hand, we see that God truly cares deeply for His creation, and especially for us human beings, created in His image as we are.  He wants us to be right with Him.  He wants us to know how deep is His care and devotion for us, that He would even surrender up His own Son to rescue us from the pit of our own devising.  He searches far and wide, calling out to us, restoring us, and giving us hope of renewal.  In other words, even at our worst, God still wants to rescue us and redeem us, no matter how far we may have fallen.

We see God's law at work in many ways throughout the Bible.  God tells us what our lives are to look like as His people.  He tells us what He expects, what He looks for, and what is pleasing in His sight.  He tells us how He created things to operate, and how our relationships with each other are to look.  All of these fall under His Law.

We also see God's great care at work throughout the Bible.  He looks for the lost sheep.  He cares for the poor and the sojourner.  For those who have wandered, He cries out, calling them to return.  It doesn't matter how far away they are, or how slight their missteps are, He wants them to hear Him and return to Him.  He even goes so far as to take the necessary action to make sure they can return to Him for good. 

When you read through your Bible, you will see elements of one or the other of these on pretty much every single page, whether it is history, teaching, songs, or laments.  These two teachings, the law and the gospel, fill the pages of the Bible.  Now, what that means for us is something we will continue to ponder in future posts.

A very Lutheran Thing: The Law and the Gospel

My apologies to those of you who have missed my postings on here.  While I could offer up the excuse of much going on, that is all it would be: an excuse.  However, I want to pick this back up, and over the coming days and weeks, I will be doing a series of posts on something that is often seen as very Lutheran: the distinction of God's Law and the good news of God's Gospel.

Before I begin, though, I should probably start off with an explanation of what these two things really are.  Defining terms is a vitally important thing, especially as our language tends to rub the rough edges off of the meanings of words.  When we say a word, there is a reason that there are different words that say roughly the same thing.  In our day and age, much of those distinctions seem to be lost from time to time.

So, to start off, what is God's Law?  Well, there are various ways of answering that question, and I won't pretend to be the final authority on it.  Some would see it as everything that God says in such places as the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses.  Often in the Scriptures, that is what is spoken of when God's Law is mentioned.  However, looking through those five books, we see different types of law.  Some are moral, some are ceremonial, and some deal with the life of God's people, the Israelites, in how they were to interact as a society.  Three different applications, yet one word, law, used to represent them all.

For my purposes here, we will be using the word Law to mean the way that God designed His people to live, and thus, find that represented best in the moral law, which God spoke and expanded upon in the Ten Commandments.  So, while God may mention in the Old Testament that the eating of shellfish and pigs are not according to His law, those are more for His people of that time.  They are not moral law.  What we see in the commandments, and the different ways that God expands upon that, are what the focus of the word "law" is, as I will be using it.

Likewise, the Gospel, in its truest translation, is the good news.  It is the announcement of God's gracious interactions toward His people, especially in Jesus' work of His perfect life, His sacrificial and substitutionary death, and His victorious rising to new life, and now giving that new life to us through the announcement of His good news to the people of the world.  Like the word law, you can find other elements than this at work in the whole of the Bible, but for our purposes, this paragraph explains how I will be using the word.

There you have it.  The Law and the Gospel.  Last point for today.  The things I will be writing about over the next few weeks will be drawn from a book entitled "Law and Gospel", taken from lectures given by the first president of my particular church body well over a century and half ago, a man by the name of C. F. W. Walther.  I will take time to examine the various theses that he lectured on, hoping that these strike you in profound ways as we consider God's good news to us in Jesus.